Museum of Edinburgh

Website

Telephone

0131 529 4143

Fax

0131 557 3346

All information is drawn from or provided by the venues themselves and every effort is made to ensure it is correct. Please remember to double check opening hours with the venue concerned before making a special visit.

The Museum of Edinburgh is the City’s treasure box - a maze of historic rooms crammed full of iconic objects from the Capital’s past.

Find out about the history of Edinburgh from the earliest times to the present day. Discover more about the city, its people, crafts and trades and the beautiful objects they created.

Venue Type:

Museum

Opening hours

Mon-Sat 10.00-17.00In August Sun 12.00-17.00

Closed: Sundays September to July

Admission charges

Please check before visiting.

If you know the story of 'Greyfriars Bobby ', you will be thrilled to see his collar and feeding bowl, and the original plaster model for the bronze statue in Candlemaker Row.One of the museum's great treasures is the National Covenant, signed by Scotland's presbyterian leadership in 1638, while the collections of Scottish pottery and items relating to Field Marshal Earl Haig are of national importance. The museum also features Edinburgh silver and glass, and a colourful collection of shop signs. The home of The Museum of Edinburgh is picturesque Huntly House, which faces on to the Canongate and dates from the 16th century. It was extended in the 17th and 18th centuries, and has been home to a wide variety of owners and tenants, ranging from aristocrats to merchants and working people. Robert Chambers, a Victorian antiquarian, called Huntly House the ' speaking house' because of the Latin inscriptions on its facade. It is appropriate that the 'speaking house' now accomodates The Museum of Edinburgh. The Museum of Edinburgh regularly mounts temporary exhibitions drawn from the local history and decorative art collections.

Key artists and exhibits

Exhibition details are listed below, you may need to scroll down to see them all.

Exhibition (temporary)

Scars on the City: Edinburgh in World War I

5 February — 27 June 2015 *on now

What was it like to be in Edinburgh while World War I was raging? What were the dangers and excitements, the hardships and the joys? Scars on the City brings wartime Edinburgh to life, exploring the Zeppelin raids that destroyed people and buildings, the recruitment drives that thronged the streets, the life of women war workers in the City and the experiences of Edinburgh’s children.

Packed with fascinating photographs and objects from shrapnel and bullet casings to knitted comforts and military board games, Scars on the City shows the thrill and horror of a War that reached beyond the front line to our own doorstep.

Website

'A Clearer Light' - Lord Hailes and the Scottish Enlightenment

28 June — 22 September 2015

He was born to an important Scottish family as Scotland was emerging as one of the most influential nations in Europe. But like his native land, Lord Hailes was not to become influential by great political power or enormous wealth, but rather through the power of ideas.

His was a time when Scotland – and in particular Edinburgh – was reshaping the world with new ideas in law, history, literature, philosophy, economics, medicine and science. If Lord Hailes’ Edinburgh was ‘the capital of the mind’ he was one of its intellectual senators, and his house at Newhailes ‘a mansion of the mind.’

Exhibition (temporary)

Treasures found: archaeology from the East of Scotland

6 July — 13 September 2015

From a Bronze Age spear head to roman coins and a medieval pilgrim badge, a selection of fascinating recent archaeological finds from the East of Scotland shed light on the archaeological history of the area.

Roman and Dark Age Cramond

Dates to be confirmed:Monday to Saturday 10am - 5pmWho is this for? - AllDates: 1 October 2015 - 30 April 2016Cost: Free

The Roman occupation and Dark Age bodies from the Bathhouse will be explored, and the forensic science behind archaeological investigation such as Isotopic, DNA, forensic analysis and reconstructions will be explained.

As referendum fever rages in Scotland and hits the UK national news, the Museum of Edinburgh presents a retrospective of the two previous referendums in 1979 and 1997 with a selection of materials from its own collections and the Scottish Political Archive in Stirling.